I’m very excited to be starting this new website! It’s hard to know where to begin and there’s so much to be said…. and I have so much to say! So I’ll just take a deep breath and ramble just a bit to give you an idea of the direction I’m headed with this website/blog. I became actively interested in women’s health soon after high school, right around the time I came to the realization that I really didn’t want to be on birth control pills anymore. That’s when I realized I had no idea how to prevent pregnancy without the pill and I was very concerned about accidentally becoming pregnant. Even though I had some minimal sex education in both graded school and high school, I felt totally ignorant about my body and how to protect myself from pregnancy. This triggered a quest for information, which continues to this day.

Back when I began my search for information in the days before the internet, my primary sources for information were bookstores, coffee shops and the people I might meet there. Every time I would find a new book on this topic I would buy it and devour the information and search for more! As I gathered information, I felt like every woman needed to know this stuff and had a hard time understanding why we were not being taught this information. It was the type of information I wished my mom had been able to tell me about, but I suspect she didn’t know either. We live in these amazing and wonderful bodies yet we seem to know so little about their inner workings. A goal of this website is to change this for as many women as possible worldwide.

Recently I was reading a book by Sheri Winston called Women’s Anatomy of Arousal in which she lamented the limitations of our language as we try to express and define sexuality. I agree and find the same to be true when it comes to defining and exploring our bodies and describing our fertility cycles. Things like sex and menstruation are treated as taboo subjects; it is our challenge to redefine these subjects.

She writes “our culture hasn’t given us a good vocabulary for talking about sex. We have scientific terms, baby talk, euphemisms, and super-charged so-called dirty words like pussy and fuck.” She notes that “as a healer, teacher and writer, I constantly have to navigate the straits of the limitations of our language. It’s not easy to do: the choice is essentially between formal to the point of pomposity (scientific language), vague and silly (baby words and euphemisms), and provocative (the “dirty words”).” She draws from these three choices and other lesser known vocabularies like pulling terms from the ancient Sanskrit language like “yoni” which refers to the female genitalia. I think I’ll follow her lead, although I tend to lean towards the scientific lingo because I think it’s important for young women to learn the language of anatomy and physiology so that we can speak confidently about our bodies. By the way, if you are interested in great sex I highly recommend Sheri’s book.

The female body has the most complex and beautiful dance of hormones which evolves as we cycle over the course our lives. With the initiation of hormonal changes in puberty our cycles continually evolve and are influenced by reproductive and environmental events that transpire during our lives until the hormonal phase of our lives finally fades with the onset of menopause. I look forward to exploring the female body with you all!